UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies

In the context of a broader study of the policy process related to hydrogen as a fuel, we designed an electronic survey to collect policy beliefs from a wide range of stakeholders. In May, 2005, we sent an email to a sample of about 4,000 individuals, from about 1,450 different organizations in the United States and many other countries. The email contained a description of our study of the policy process related to hydrogen, an invitation to participate from the study, and a link to our online survey. The sample was drawn from several sources, primarily databases of attendees to conferences related to hydrogen.

A total of 502 responses from 323 organizations were obtained, for an approximate 12% individuals' response rate and a 22% organizations' response rate. While we believe these response rates are encouraging taking into account that our survey targeted people with significant time constraints, it may be misleading to assess the quality of the response based on response rates. We prefer to assess this quality by looking at two factors: a) the distribution of responses across organization categories, and b) whether responses were obtained from key stakeholders. Based on these factors, we believe our survey was extremely successful in terms of the quality of response.

This document describes the sample of respondents and presents the descriptive statistics of major policy variables obtained from their responses.